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Reliability Community by VITA

The Reliability Community is a collaborative effort by VITA members to develop a series of standards and guidelines to establish reliability practices for the Critical Embedded Computing industry. The community is comprised of representatives from electronics suppliers, system integrators, and the Department of Defense (DoD). These members have developed community of practice documents that define electronics failure rate prediction methodologies and standards.

In the 1950’s, electronics reliability models were derived and standardized by the DoD through the analysis of historical failure data. In 1961, the first edition of MIL-HDBK-217 was published, providing a basic reliability analysis tool that is still in use today.

In 1994, U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry published his pivotal memorandum titled “Specifications & Standards - A New Way of Doing Business.” This memo, and the changes in military acquisition that followed, caused many military standards to be cancelled in favor of commercial standards and practices. A consequence of this memo is the DoD is no longer updating MIL-HDBK-217, but is looking to industry organizations to provide updated reliability prediction methods.

The Reliability Community working group was formed to investigate and develop industry standards to address electronics failure rate prediction and assessment. Where applicable, these standards provide adjustment factors to existing standards. As new electronics technology is developed, new methods will be developed, documented and added to future releases of these standards and subsidiary specifications.

Scope

The Reliability Community addresses the limitations of existing prediction practices, with a series of subsidiary specifications that contain the “best practices” within industry for performing electronics failure rate predictions.

The Reliability Community recognizes there are many industry reliability methods, each with a custodian and acceptable practices to calculate electronics failure rate predictions. If such a method is identified as requiring additional standards for use by electronics module suppliers, a new subsidiary specification will be considered by the Reliability Community working group.

Purpose

The purpose of the Reliability Community is to establish an ecosystem of interested parties that promotes and creates reliability practices.